Ricerc@Sapienza

Industrial control applications are today software defined and networked making them even more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Hence there is the need to investigate new solutions that are secure by design. In this paper, we address this challenge
by proposing a model and an architecture for a controller that, by using redundancy, is capable of detecting cyber-attacks to
its logic and that enables the implementation of mitigation and prevention mechanisms.

Frequently, it is believed that the adoption of encryption is adequate to ensure the safety of the message. However, encryption only restricts unapproved individuals from decoding the message. Whereas in many circumstances, the mere presence of communication or variations in communication patterns, such as an increase in message rate, is sufficient to raise doubt and initiate alerts. One of the best ways to bypass that is by using covert channels.